As you might have read around the web, the 2015 exam has become a bit more difficult with respect to its previous versions.

You have 90 minutes to answer 70 multiple choice questions. You are not allowed to pause the test or review your answers. Don’t panic, 1.5 minutes per question is largely enough if you are well prepared, trust me!

Before starting with the topics, I would warmly suggest you not to take the exam if you didn’t get your hands dirty with a sample account. The online material from Analytics Academy and the additional resources around the web might be enough to take the test, but does it make sense to become “Analytics Certified” and have never configured an account or experienced setting up business goals and tracked them on a website? Maybe not 😉

Ready? Here we go with the topics!

GA Basic Notions

There will definitely be a couple of questions around basic notions of Digital Analytics. The Digital Analytics Fundamentals course covers all of these aspects.

Here are some sample questions:

Do the GA Terms of Service permit sending personally identifying information (PII) to Google?

What are Digital Analytics?

During which phase of the project should you add Analytics tracking code to your site?

Reports Interpretation

There will be a lot of questions around reports (ok, it was pretty obvious). The questions will mostly be on “Standard” Analytics reports, but also on AdWords and E-Commerce specific ones.

Read the questions carefully! Sometimes a little word might change the whole sense of the question (I had 2-3 questions around RealTime report vs. Intelligence Alerts and if you miss the keyword “weekly” or “immediately” in the question you might give a wrong answer).

Your questions might look a bit like this.

Which of the following would most quickly allow you to determine whether the Google Analytics code snippet is working? RealTime, Intelligence Alerts, Annotations, Secondary Dimensions

You need to immediately find out whether people are viewing the new content that you just added today. Which of the following would be most useful? RealTime, Intelligence Alerts, Annotations, Secondary Dimensions

Which AdWords report would you use to investigate when you should modify your bidding during certain hours of the day to optimize conversions?

Which report would you use to show two date ranges on the same graph?

When you share a link to a custom report, you also share the data in the report? True/False

Which report would you use to know whether button is clicked more often than button?

Which question can be answered with the goal flow report?

Which types of data can be collected and reported in the Site Speed reports?

Account / Property / Views Setup & Tracking

Again, these topics are covered in the Digital Fundamentals lessons but having tried out the Admin interface or played a bit with the tracking code will definitely help!

In which of the following circumstances would you want to increase the default session timeout length in Google Analytics? Users spend less than 2 minutes on each page of your site? The average length of videos on your site is 35 minutes? You need to start collecting RealTime data?

How can you adjust the report sample size in Google Analytics?

What method would you use to send data from a web connected point of sale system to Google Analytics?

What method would you use to send data from a website to Google Analytics?

In order to separately track a website and a mobile app in Google Analytics how should you structure your accounts?

You want a second view of your data where you only see traffic to a specific subdirectory. What is the best way to set this up?

How can you add data to Google Analytics?

Metrics & Dimensions

Be prepared about many questions around metrics and dimensions. Understanding the difference of course, but also being able to decide when a given metric is useful and what is it telling you about the visitor behavior. A real-life scenario (like in the academy trainings) is often used to contextualize questions.

Goals & Conversions

There will be quite a lot of focus around this topic. Make sure you understand how goal setup works, how conversions are calculated, why their value is useful and what the differences with E-Commerce are. Here is a pretty good summary by the Search Engine Journal about this topic, or the resources from Google in regards.

Which of the following could be measured by defining a goal in Google Analytics?

A micro conversion occurs when…?

A macro conversion occurs when…?

Which attribution model would be useful for evaluating ads and campaigns that are designed to create initial awareness about a brand?

What does it mean if a paid keyword has an Assisted Last Click or Direct Conversions value of 5?

Considering scenario XYZ […], which of the following represent a micro conversion for your site? A view of the homepage; A product is purchased; A coupon is downloaded

Why is it useful to assign a goal value when configuring a goal?

Your web property is www.test123.com. You set up a URL goal with Match Type “Begins with” and Value “thankyou”. Which of the following URLs will count as a goal? […] (where the URLs in the multiple choice do or do not match that pattern)

Filters

Quite some questions will be about filters. How they work, what you can do with and when does it make sense to use them. Understanding of Regular Expressions is required.

By using filters, you can … Change how the data looks in reports, Include data in a view, Exclude data from a view, All of these answers

Why is it important that you maintain one unfiltered view in your Analytics account?

The URL for the homepage of your site is www.abc.com/hello. What can you do to make this page appear as “home” in your Pages report?

Which of the following are possible uses of filters? Exclude visits from an IP Address, Include traffic from a campaign, Replace a string in the URL, All of these

Segments

Beside understanding what segmentation is, it’s important to capture from the trainings how segmenting data helps you in spotting weaknesses (or strength) of your website. “Debugging scenarios” by segmenting the traffic to isolate problems is a very common practice! Here you go with a couple of test questions.

Which of the following would be valid segments to consider using to analyze traffic patterns in your data? Traffic by device; Traffic by country; Traffic by social source; All of these answers.

Which of the following are true about segmentation? Segmentation does not work on historical data; Segmentation allows you to isolate and analyze subsets of your data; Segmentation is a technique that should only be used by experienced analysts.

Traffic Sources & URL Tagging

Here you go with the most classic of the linked tools from Google: the URL builder. Make sure you understood how medium, source, campaign influence your analytics data and why it’s important to set them when you send an email or when you (e.g.) create a QR code.

What is the purpose of the URL builder?

Which of the following is not a standard campaign parameter? utm_content, utm_campaign, utm_adgroup, utm_source

Which of the following are examples of sources? …

Which of the following is not a default medium in Google Analytics? …

Other Tools & Products

You might get a couple of questions about Google Tag Manager, or other tools like DoubleClick… oups I gave you one answer 😉

What are the advantages of implementing Google Tag Manager?

Where does Google Analytics get the demographics and interest category information data from?

Wrap Up

The goal of this post was not to provide a cheat sheet to answer your exam questions (also because I voluntarily didn’t provide the answers), but to provide you a resource to be a bit more prepared for the test.

As already mentioned, you not only need to study well the lesson material, but also make a bit of practice with the tool!